No crashes to report. I continue to make efforts to avoid, rather than survive, any wreck. After seeing rumors of daytime lights being useful, I ride with front and rear lights at all times, and always use eye protection and no headphones.

Apart from the few car drivers I encounter at unavoidable intersections, mamils may be the biggest threat. One sped past this morning sporting a teardrop helmet, sure to escape the beautiful weather and arrive at his meeting ten seconds earlier.

Someone at the office always removes their front wheel before locking, making me wonder if he or she knows something I don't. This morning the wheel was sitting loose, and the frame was secured by nothing more than a brake cable.

The Future

It's getting silly out there. I skimmed a report that predicted, with arguable plausibility, 90% more better everything thanks to Transport as a Service. From page 8:

Oil demand will peak at 100 million barrels per day by 2020, dropping to 70 million barrels per day by 2030. That represents a drop of 30 million barrels in real terms and 40 million barrels below the Energy Information Administration’s current “business as usual” case. This will have a catastrophic effect on the oil industry through price collapse (an equilibrium cost of $25.4 per barrel)

This would be comfortable win territory for my double-or-nothing oil bet.

I got out of the habit of checking cryptocurrencies for a few weeks and everything went wild. Ripple took second place after Bitcoin in market cap with an ongoing hockey stick tear. A guy at work who kept saying "bubble" last week went to a Bitcoin ATM last night and bought in.

In other news, cryptocurrency ATMs exist. He said something about two-factor authentication and I was impressed that someone could get a machine to comply with know-your-customer and anti-money-laundering requirements. But when I pressed for details about the transaction, he said he didn't have to smile at the camera and showed no ID. Enter mobile number, insert cash, then get (or display?) wallet address QR code and you are a player. I aim to give it a try, but if anyone else can test drive the system please do report in.

There was a planned liquidation at Kraken that coincided quite nicely with a DDOS. Both events coincided with leaked Ripple rumors about locking up currency. It's a pretty obvious manipulation of one consortium over another in an attempt to favor one blockchain over another; if XRP wins, there's a nice consortium of Japanese banks that will make a killing. If ETH wins, it'll be American banks.

Studying crypto is useful because it illustrates what the regulated markets are trying to do but have to be sneaky about because regulation. Crypto? Fuckin' wild wild west.